NEWS 5 Aug 2009: Version 15.6301 (pop_internal_version 156301)

NEWS 29 Jun 2009: Version 15.63 (pop_internal_version 156300)

Removed special Ved characters from all the documentation files
to make things easy for people who don't wish to learn to use
Ved or XVed.

The main difference between this version (v15.63) and the previous
version
v15.62 is that in this version all the
Poplog documentation files have been converted so that they can be
read in any text editor or web browser. Previously the files
included special graphical characters for use with the Poplog editor
Ved/XVed. This was a disadvantage for users who did not wish to
switch to a new editor, even though the poplog editor has many
convenient built in links with the rest of poplog, including the
compilers, the documentation directories and the library
directories.

Two changes to popvision, described in
$usepop/pop/packages/popvision/README.bham
popvision/lib/Xcolour_to_rgb.p
added directory '/usr/share/X11/rgb.txt'
to Xcolour_to_rgb_filelist
popvision/lib/sunrasterfile.p
Installed Jack Hollingworth's fix for updater
of sunrasterfile for use on little-endian machines.

A problem in the editor that made it produce multiple copies of
the same file (especially output.p) has been identified and removed.

NEWS 25 Dec 2007

Expanded the instructions for Ubuntu users, which turned out to
be incomplete.
Also modified several of the Poplog scripts to invoke 'bash'
instead of 'sh', as it turns out that these two are not
equivalent on all systems.
(Ubuntu Gutsy links 'sh' to 'dash', not 'bash')

NEWS 23 Nov 2007

Added simple pop-11 syntax highlighting command for VED, in
$usepop/pop/lib/ved/ved_highlight.p
The command
ENTER highlight
will underline all syntax words, apart from those included in
the list assigned to global variable
highlight_exceptions
To see what the exceptions are do
ENTER showlib highlight_exceptions
If you don't want to fetch a complete poplog system, the file
can be downloaded on its own from
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/v15.62/v15.62/pop/lib/ved/ved_highlight.p
Simply install it in the directory $usepop/pop/lib/ved/ in your
current poplog system. It will then be autoloadable.
Undo highlighting with ENTER strip

NEWS 5 Oct 2007

New version of Poplog v15.61 available, with pop_internal_version
set to: 156101
The most important change is that the problem described in Bug 32
in here (originally reported by Steve Leach):
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/bugfixes/BUGREPORTS
-- 32. (18 Feb 2004) Bug in current_directory under Linux (and Unix?)
has started causing serious problems with new releases of Linux
installed with enhanced security settings. This was reported
recently to the poplog-dev list by Stephen Isard.
The problem was fixed by changing the pop-11 mechanism for
getting at the current directory, provided by Waldek Hebisch
and described in the BUGREPORTS file as item 66:
-- 66. 29 Sep 2007 New version of unix_dir.p
There are a few other minor improvements to the installation
process. The easiest way to fetch and install 32 bit Linux
Poplog remains the use of one of
the get-and-install scripts described below.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR INSTALLING LINUX POPLOG VERSION 15.6.4

Prerequisites

NOTE: this is a 32 bit version of Poplog
If you are using a 64 bit version of linux you will need to have a
full complement of 32-bit development libraries in order to install
poplog v15.63. Failing that there is a 64 bit version
of poplog here (temporarily linked to the v15.62 version).

The last two (motif or lesstif) are desirable but optional, as
explained below.

You can install those packages either using the synaptic package
manager, or more simply by using 'apt-get' with this command in an
xterm or console window (if you don't wish to type everything in one
line you can use the backslash character "\" to indicate that lines
must be joined in a single command, as illustrated here):

(or replace the last two items with 'lesstif lesstif-dev')
The instructions for setting up the extra package repositories and
for selecting packages to download are illustrated graphically
in David Brooks' web site for Poplog users
(though some of the required packages need to be added to his list.)
See his web page here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/ubuntu/djb

Make sure that you install everything listed above.

After installing those 'X' libraries the following
should exist as symbolic links:

NOTE: Other versions of linux (e.g. RHEL, CentOS, Fedora Core, ...)
People using other versions of linux should check that they have
the gcc libraries, csh/tcsh and both of

either
motif
motif-devel
or
lesstif
lesstif-devel

E.g. you should be able to install one of those pairs using 'yum' in
RedHat/Fedora systems:

yum install motif motif-devel
or
yum install lesstif lesstif-devel

Make sure that you have the 'devel' packages for the X11 libraries
installed. Otherwise the link commands in the poplog installation
scripts will fail. E.g. you could use the following, in addition
to the commands for installing motif (or lesstif):

NOTE: The following is no longer true, as making symbolic links is
not an adequate substitute for installing the 'devel' or 'dev'
packages:

If you run it as super user (using sudo on Ubuntu) it may also
create directories and links that you will need. Otherwise, it
merely reports what it finds.

NOTE: use of 'csh'

Many linux systems now do not provide /bin/csh. Some older poplog
scripts may still use that, although an attempt is being made to
remove dependency on 'csh', so that everything will work with
'bash', which should be available on all linux systems.

If /bin/csh does not exist on your system, but /bin/tcsh does exist,
you can simply, as super-user, create a symbolic link, thus:

cd /bin
ln -s tcsh csh

Otherwise try to find and install csh for your system (or tcsh,
which is a later, but wholly compatible, version of csh). Ubuntu
users, please see instructions above.

This has the great advantage of supporting remote use of graphical
tools: the tools can run on a machine in one location while users
are using a machine connected to it by a network. This is now
commonplace using web browsers, but the X window system, based on
Unix, had the idea long before there were web browsers. Poplog
provides a wide range of 2-D graphical facilities based on X. There
are some library packages that extend the X facilities and one of
those is the 'motif' widget toolkit, which is used by many tools
that run on linux and unix. It is described
here.
A royalty free version is OpenMotif described
here. Some
unix distributors object to licence conditions of both Motif and
OpenMotif and have switched to using an open source
non-proprietary replacement called Lesstif, described
here. Lesstif is
almost fully compatible with Motif, but not quite, and this has
caused minor problems for poplog,
now fixed.

You don't need any of Motif, OpenMotif or Lesstif to use Poplog
graphical facilities, though it can be useful to have one of them,
and this is assumed to be the default when you install Poplog.

The RCLIB graphical extension to Poplog, described
here,
was designed to work without Motif.

However there are some advantages in the use of Poplog with
motif, insofar as the graphical version of the editor, XVed, has
menu buttons and a scrollbar if Motif or Lesstif is available.
There is a Poplog_ui toolkit based on Motif, which some users find
helpful. So if you can get hold of Motif or Lesstif, that is
recommended. You will also need the 'devel' versions (motif-devel or
lesstif-devel), as described below in order to be able to run Poplog
with Motif extensions.

When you have a choice you should install Motif rather than Lesstif
as the former is less likely to cause problems. (This may no longer
be true.)

If you cannot or do not wish to install Motif or Lesstif, you can
run the poplog install script with the 'nomotif' option. However,
the simplified get-and-install scripts described below use 'motif'.
It is trivial to edit them to replace that with 'nomotif' before
running them.

There are two small shell scripts available. Choose one of them,
after reading about what they do, save it to a directory where you
have space to copy at least 20MB files required to install poplog
(or 17MB after July 17th 2009).
Make it executable, as described below, then run it. You can decide
whether you want poplog installed in the default location
/usr/local/poplog, or somewhere else. It will need to go into a
partition where there is about 80MB of free space. (You may not need
all of it: some of the installation can be deleted if you don't need
it, e.g. the portions for prolog, common lisp, ML, vision libraries,
etc.)

Use your browser to save this, then make it executable (chmod ugo+rx
filename)
Running this
will fetch installation scripts and the poplog V15.6.4 tar file,
and install the system in the default location /usr/local/poplog

It will also attempt to set up links for poplog in /usr/local/bin
and /usr/local/man, so you will need either to have access to those
directories or else run the script as super-user

Use your browser to save this, then make it executable (chmod ugo+rx
filename)
Running this
will fetch installation scripts and the poplog V15.6.4 tar file,
and install the system in a subdirectory of the current directory,
called v15.6.4/pop/

It does not attempt to install links in /usr/local directories
(though you can do that later).

Decide which of those two you wish to use, then download it and put
it in a directory on a file partition where you have enough file
space. You will need about 17MB for the downloaded shell scripts and
the Poplog tar file. In addition you will need about 80MB either in
the /usr/local partition or in the partition where you run the
'get-and-install-here' script.

Make the chosen script executable after downloading it. e.g. using
one of these two 'chmod' commands:

chmod ugo+rx get-and-install
chmod ugo+rx get-and-install-here

You may wish to read the script first, and, if you are a linux
expert, change something before running it.

It uses the 'wget' command to
fetch the files. If you are using it behind a web proxy server, you
will have to set the appropriate environment variable ($http_proxy)
to allow 'wget' to get through the server, e.g. something like this
(for bash users):

http_proxy=http://webcache.foo.baz.ac.uk:3128
export http_proxy

Run the script in an xterm window or other console window.

The time it takes will depend largely on how long it takes you to
download the main tar file (less than 19MB) and how long your PC
takes to run the installation script. On fairly new PCs the
installation could take less than a minute. On older PCs at most
a few minutes.

Both scripts produce a log file called v15.6.4/install.log which can
be used to provide information if you have problems.

If the installation triggers linker or other errors they will not go
into the log file,
but will be displayed on the screen. You'll have to select and paste
the messages to include in any report.

For more information on what those scripts do, please see the
message posted to pop-forum and
comp.lang.pop
now available
here.

The script that unpacks and installs that file is
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/v15.6.4/INSTALL_BHAM_LINUX_POPLOG
If the get-and-install scripts do not work, fetch this 5KByte file
and install it in the same directory as the tar bundle above, then
make it executable and run it twice, the first time to discover the
options, the second time with the options you want specified.